HELPING HAND – Bob Lancaster discusses participation in the Red Cross relief efforts during the October fires around San Diego while photos taken by him and relief personnel are shown on his television set in Cotuit.

Geologist Bob Lancaster of Cotuit spent most of his adult life “growing” crystals from earthly elements that allowed soldiers to see in the dark. Now he’s helping thousands of disaster victims eye the light of day.

As Lancaster spoke last week in his ample home surrounded by gardens cultivated with his wife, Christine, the scientific spacecraft Cassini was orbiting the planet Saturn some 746 million miles up in the cosmos, give or take a mile, collecting data and, among varied experiments, taking various infrared photos, a technology that Lancaster helped develop.

Simultaneously back on Earth, hundreds if not thousands of people displaced by natural disasters around San Diego and Indiana in the last 10 months were rebuilding their lives because Lancaster was willing, as were many other Red Cross volunteers, to give desperate victims of Mother Nature’s wrath a helping hand during hard times.

He was in San Diego for the searing October wildfires that ravaged 1,500 homes and 500,000 acres of forest and brush and in Indiana in June when the rain-swollen rivers scaled their banks and inundated the man-made infrastructure including hospitals, homes, utilities systems, making it the second costliest disaster ever in that state. It left countless people homeless and stranded – bowed grandmothers, bewildered parents, frightened children - without food and water, without clothing, without ready currency, without towel and tooth brush, without jobs, with nothing but reliance on volunteers like Lancaster to help fill their immediate needs and impart hope for the long run.

How Lancaster came to be in the midst of these two calamities more than 1,000 miles apart begins at some point in his geological career in a Boston suburb following graduation from Boston University.

“When I was still working, I attended first responder training for the company (Honeywell) given by the Red Cross in Boston. It was my first exposure to the Red Cross.”

After retiring to Cape Cod 12 years ago, still a young 62, and recognizing that life “had been good to us,” Lancaster and his wife answered the call for volunteers in August 2005 by the Cape’s Housing Assistance Corp. in Hyannis, to assist Hurricane Katrina survivors temporarily housed on the Massachusetts Military Reservation.

“We got involved with that and felt good about it,” Lancaster, a sailor, ham radio operator and scuba diver, said. “But I’m not at all certain exactly how that eventually linked us to the local Red Cross.”

Suffice it to say that one day the couple went to the American Red Cross Chapter in Hyannis after deciding to dedicate some of their time and talents in an effort to share their own good fortune with people in distress.

“Since then we’ve taken more than 15 courses, from driving the ERV (Emergency Response Vehicle that looks outside like an ambulance) and the logistics of feeding and otherwise caring for people in crisis, setting up satellite dishes and computers, and learning the varied approaches to counsel and help those in distress.

“We respond a lot to local issues,” Lancaster said. While the couple has been at the scene of local crises here with the Red Cross Chapter, the last one at a fire that left six families homeless in Hyannis, Lancaster signed up last year to “go national.” that is, “to be ready in 12 hours to go anywhere in the United States where a crisis is occurring.” His wife, it was agreed, would cover the home front in his absence.

His first assignment came in October when a dry San Diego County began hosting a number of wildfires that were getting out of hand, creeping up on established home sites and communities, threatening Cal Tech’s Mount Palomar Observatory and the city of San Diego itself.

“My team’s job,” Lancaster said, “is to set up the crisis headquarters communication system. Our team is among the first on the scene because without communications, little can get done.

“When you are on your first assignment, you think you’ve just run into complete chaos, but surprisingly, the operations are swift and smooth and ready to help on surprisingly short notice.”

“When you get the call,” he said, “you have to commit to three weeks. You call a Red Cross 800 number and your transportation is taken care of as well as your sleeping arrangements. My first night in San Diego was spent on a cot in a high school gymnasium with 1,000 other people. We get $30 a day subsistence.”

He was amazed, he said, at the logistical efficiency coordinated by Red Cross headquarters in Washington. “FedEx, I believe, volunteers to deliver all the equipment necessary for us to set up the communications dish. It comes in about seven big suitcases. When we get there, an advance team has already rented a defunct and dirty big box store or such some place as a disaster headquarters before we arrive. Another crew has cleaned the place and local volunteers and businesses have placed tables and folding chairs.

“We set up the dish, aim it toward the satellite, string the wires and cables for a bank of computers, then help local volunteers who will man the computers overcome any glitches that may occur.”

He said his team, on arrival at crises centers, works as much as 20 straight hours to set up the computers to link with Washington headquarters via satellite. “Once that’s done, our job is to keep communications open and operative and helping other volunteers handle the computers.” The many laptops at the disaster site do not store information on the hard drive. It all goes directly to Red Cross disaster center data banks in Washington to assure the right aid is sent to the right place, he said.

By then, he said, other Red Cross teams with specific duties work in concert with other volunteer organizations and begin to distribute aid and counsel immediately.

“You should see these huge 18-wheeler trucks that show up. They open into a large traveling kitchen and people get right to work preparing meals, setting up tents to serve workers and victims.”

Meals are also packaged for distribution to outlying areas where individuals and families may be stranded, and at shelters and for volunteers and workers on the front lines. The Red Cross ERVs collect meals at the kitchens and deliver them wherever they are needed. “There are boxes and crates of food piled up…I don’t know where it all comes from.

“I frankly don’t know how they could handle disasters years ago without the communication systems we have today,” Lancaster said, And by way of explanation, he noted that his team in Indianapolis handled needs for towns as far as 150 miles away, relaying the information to Washington for quick responses to “get stuff to the various towns that need it.”

Lancaster said he missed Father’s Day at home – he has a grown son who is a lawyer – but didn’t mind that at all. “It interrupts family life a bit, but it’s not a consideration. I’m retired, so it’s no big deal for me to be away for three weeks. I admire others, like one young man I met who is a computer whiz: He actually takes his vacation time to volunteer to do this.”

If anything, he said, he’s learned how important each volunteer is to the Red Cross mission. “I know everybody can’t give time, particularly for national missions, but those who can’t certainly can donate funds.

The importance of it hits home when you’re there to experience the volunteer machinery at work helping others who really need it.”

As to night vision, Lancaster worked with crystals for 40 years with various companies outside Boston developing night optics science for military and aeronautical use, such as infrared technology that yields night vision and photography among other applications. “I became an expert at it,” Lancaster says in all modesty. “I sat at the same desk and did the same work for 40 years while the company, which started out as Honeywell, was bought and sold several times.”

Infrared, or IR, is primarily heat radiation emitted by anything with a temperature and is used extensively today by the military and aeronautics but on televised weather reports showing storm activity, among many other uses. Lancaster developed crystals that diffract light from the infrared spectrum to capture and reflect the heat images.

But that’s all in the past and now Lancaster, and his wife, have with thousands of other volunteers have become one with the backbone of the American Red Cross.

He says he and his wife have been out sailing their 34-footer only one day this year. But that’s OK.